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Rush's 'Clockwork Angels' to be Adapted into Comic Series

Hugh Syme/Anthem

What do you get if you mix steampunk, a prog rock album and the writer of "Dune" and "Star Wars" fiction? A six-issue series from Boom! Studios, apparently.

It's the combination that music and science fiction fans haven't even known that they've been waiting for: A steampunk comic book series based on a concept album by the band Rush, written by Star Wars and Dune novelist Kevin J. Anderson.

Clockwork Angels, a six-part series from Boom! Studios, is adapted from the 2012 album of the same name, but this project isn't the first time that Anderson's work has taken its inspiration from the Canadian rock band. As the writer explained, he has known the band's drummer Neil Peart for more than a quarter of a century, with the two meeting when Anderson sent the drummer a signed copy of his debut novel, which was inspired by the band's Grace Under Pressure album.

Anderson has previously adapted the Clockwork Angels album into prose, likening the process of transferring the album's music into other mediums as being "like writing the novel to Pink Floyd's The Wall or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It's obvious."

"Kevin and I had talked for years about combining a novel and an album in some fashion, but I guess the idea had to grow up as Kevin and I did -- gaining maturity and confidence in our own separate crafts, while gaining the life experience necessary to give the story its scale and depth," Peart told USA Today.

The series follows its teenage hero, Owen Hardy (who's "a lot like Voltaire's Candide," according to Anderson), as he leaves behind his small village origins to join a circus that features mechanical fortune tellers en route to the clockwork metropolis known as Crown City, home to the Watchmaker and Clockwork Angels.

Anderson described the series, illustrated by newcomer Nick Robles, as having "a charm and an innocence and a sense of wonder to it that is the complete opposite of, say, the grim, gritty future of The Matrix."